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You’re going to love WordPress 3.3′s new media uploader

Marc — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:37:21 +0000

WordPress 3.3 should be released in a very few days. It is a great version and I reccomend upgrading to it. I have been using the beta releases of WordPress 3.3 for a few weeks now and have found it almost trouble-free. The attention to detail of the WordPress team is better than ever.

The best new feature is the HTML5 media uploader which allows multiple image uploading from almost any type of device; desktops, laptops, tablets (including iPads) and smartphones (including iPhones).

Here is what the WordPress team has to say about the new media uploader features:

File Type Detection

We’ve streamlined things! Instead of needing to click on a specific upload icon based on your file type, now there’s just one. Once your file is uploaded, the appropriate fields will be displayed for entering information based on the file type.

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader

Adding photos or other files to posts and pages just got easier. Drag files from your desktop and drop them into the uploader. Add one file at a time, or many at once.

More File Formats

We’ve added the rar and 7z file formats to the list of allowed file types in the uploader.

In my judgement what really makes it a major improvement for many of my clients, particularly photographers, is the Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader. It is major improvement to WordPress making it easy and reliable to upload multiple images at a time and works in all types of devices, even iPads! While it looks like some older uploaders that use Flash or Java the new WordPress uploader is a creation of HTML5. Rather than try to describe how it works, let me show you.

This makes it even easier to add images to WordPress galleries than Flash sites like Bludomain.

An easy way to increase your WordPress site’s speed and potentially your site’s Google rank. Smushit for WP!

Marc — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:27:43 +0000

For the almost two years now Google has used site speed as a factor in your site’s search results position.

If you want to know more about that here are some links:

An informational post from Matt Cutts explaining Google’s rationale for using site speed as a factor.
A detailed article from Google Webmastercentral on using site speed in search ranking.
More from Search Engine Land on site speed as a search ranking factor.

But most important is just this, install Smushit on your WordPress site. It is easy with the WP Smushit Plugin from the free WordPress repository. WP Smushit should be part of every WP site that uses photos and images. Using Yahoo’s service, it lossless-ly reduces the size of images files making your site load faster by;

optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

It does this to both your existing images and new images you upload. Making the file size of images smaller causes your site to load faster, improving visitor experience and potentially increasing your Google search ranking.

After you install the plugin, go to your media library and have it smush all the images already there, which, depending on how many you have, can take some time. After the initial smushing, it will perform the optimization for you automatically upon each upload.

Getting on the first page of search results is often the result of many small differences and improvements. WP Smushit is an easy way to gain a helpful improvement.

IBM estimates 15% of site visits to retail sites in November are from smartphones and tablets

Marc — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:49:29 +0000

I mentioned this earlier as part of a long post, but it is very worthy of standing alone. IBM Coremetrics estimates that 15% of consumer retail site visits are using mobile devices in November 2011. This is a very recent, November 4th 2011, article and includes a trending graph showing the amazing growth of retail visits from mobile devices.

Please use the link above to read the entire, very worthwhile, article. But if you are rushed here are a couple of its nuggets:

Online Shopping Growth: Total online sales in November will experience impressive growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.
Mobile Traffic and Sales: Record numbers of consumers will shift their shopping from the PC to their mobile device this holiday season. In October nearly 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Additionally, mobile sales continue to increase, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.

ps – Keep in mind that a major share of these visitors do not have Flash enabled smartphones and tablets..

5 Great Custom Google Analytics Reports for your website – FREE

Marc — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:04:09 +0000

My Dad often said “what gets measured gets done”. And these five custom reports seem to “channel” that wisdom helping you understand your website traffic and set and meet goals. All particularly important if you are an online marketer or derive other revenue from your website. And the standard Google Analytics reports often don’t provide some of the data detail you need.

I will be brief, just do the following now. Get the details, why these are most useful, how to use the reports and install the reports in your Google Analytics account by going to this Search Engine Watch article by Greg Habermann “My Top 5 Most Used Custom Reports in Google Analytics“.

These are excellent well crafted reports for analyzing your site traffic and making well-reasoned changes to your site to increase your results and meet your goal.

This is one of my favorite articles of this month and if you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.

Measuring the SEO of your site, your competitors’ sites and the people trying to sell you SEO services

Marc — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:16:44 +0000

There are a lot advantages to having a website with strong, positive, active SEO properties and structure. The search marketing opportunities from excellent SEO may dramatically increase your business income and significantly reduce expenses.

Many website owners will pursue trying to improve their site’s SEO but have little in the way of methods to measure progress or change. Before you spend a lot of time and/or money on SEO it is very helpful to have “baselines” to measure your own site and how it “stacks-up” against your competition. Also before you buy any SEO services I suggest measuring the site of the SEO company. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that if they are selling the service shouldn’t their site(s) demonstrate some of their SEO ability?

So how to measure a website’s SEO? There are a lot of tools, but there are two I use everyday. These provide a quick snapshot of a site’s SEO potential and can be refreshed to show the results of any changes that you make. This means you get an idea of your progress without having to wait possibly weeks for Google’s index to reflect your changes.

They are:

the Website Grader website and,
Vladimir Prelovac’s SEO Doctor add-on for Firefox (you will need to use Firefox)

Both of these tools will provide you a numeric percentage type score and some summary evaluations of important site structure, elements and assets. It is important to understand that these tools cannot measure the outcome of your SEO efforts. (After all you can have great SEO but have it poorly targeted to your potential market. ) But even if you have the best content it will likely fail in the search engine results against your competitors if your site does not score well.

And what is a good score? Glad you asked. In a competitive market I think you need to be above 95 (or work towards) in the SEO Doctor and above 90 in the Website Grader, for meaningful organic search marketing. Because successful search marketing can provide such lucrative results to a business “winning” is now a matter of very small percentages. The difference of 1-3 percent in either of these tools can mean your site will not appear high enough in organic SERPs to gain any visitors. The race is not between sites that score 80% and 90% neither of them maybe winning, it is between the sites at 94% to 99%. So if you want the benefits of organic search you can’t settle with being better than 80% of websites. You need to be better than 95% percent of them.

Finally, just one note of caution in using the tools, don’t follow the tools blindly. Sometimes there is a good reason to vary from their offered guidelines. Just know your purpose in doing it.

As always, if you have a question send me an email.

A Dream Wedding by Sharon Replaces Their Old Bludomain Flash Website with a New WordPress Site

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:06:30 +0000

Well known San Diego wedding planner Sharon Cole of A Dream Wedding by Sharon contacted me regarding improving her search engine marketing and internet presence. For a number of years she had been using a Bludomain website but recently found that with increasing competition, her website traffic and leads had become almost nil. This is in spite of her being an area ABC leader and the all the awards and news paper articles and links she had developed over the years in business in San Diego.

In looking into her site’s presence, we discovered that her website was virtually not present in Google’s index. Even Google searching with her business name and city the site was not found. The reason for this is because the inherently low “indexability” of a Bludomain site combined with no changes to the site in years. Effectively the search engine calculated that the site was just not relevant for what people may be searching. You see, most Bludomain websites really only have two actual pages, the splash page and the rest of the Flash website. The website itself is functionally just one page of Flash content with different actions. When we discussed all this the plan became multi-faceted and clear.

Sharon and Maria (her office manager) improved the legacy splash page text content and began using Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics to begin to “wake” up the site. I helped Maria install WordPress on the Bludomain hosting account and behind the scenes started to create an all new WordPress based website for A Dream Wedding by Sharon. A little progress, Sharon’s legacy site returned to Google’s index, though very far down in the listings.

But the Bludomain hosting account was very troublesome for WordPress. The blog was always a struggle with loading plugins and having errors. Bludomain’s hosting setup is often not a very friendly enviroment for WordPress, more so with WP 3.0. So the new WP based website would be based on a non-Bludomain server. (When the time came to choose whether the legacy Bludomain site would be kept, moved or dropped it was decided, after Bludomain quoted $80 to move it for what was effectively 2 indexed pages, that the site would be allowed to “fade away” and the savings used elsewhere.)

It’s done, and Sharon feels the new site is a great fresh look for her San Diego wedding planning business, and not like a typical blog site. And it succeeds in Google, search marketing and social media marketing. The new site already has well over 90 pages in Google index, is moving up in search placement and search traffic and best of all the site traffic has increased almost 10 fold. Plus it is easy to add new information, pages and posts to it to tailor internet marketing to the interest of today’s bride to be. When Sharon adds new content to the site it automatically Tweets the news and posts content to Facebook. And, not to forget that the new site is also viewable in iPhones and other mobile devices where her Bludomain site was not.

Please visit and take a look at A Dream Wedding by Sharon’s new web/blogsite. If you have questions about Bludomain SEO, internet marketing or WordPress based web/blog sites please send me an email.

How to Import Your Website Blog into Your Facebook Business Page

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:12:33 +0000

UPDATE: Importing a blog into a Facebook business page is no longer supported by Facebook. Please see this post for more details – You can no longer feed your blog to your Facebook page. To import a blog or other pages from your website you will need to create a custom tab for your Facebook busines page. More on how to do that soon.

- – - – -

Here is the how-to for automatically importing your website’s blog posts onto your Facebook business page. It is not very complicated, but it is not very intuitive either so it made sense to share the instructions in a short video.

As I mention in the video it can take a while before Facebook recognizes your website blog, but be persistent it will work eventually and it is well worth it from both a social media marketing effort as well as enhanced search engine presence. If you have any questions send me an email.

Measurements – Four Favorite WordPress Stat/Analytics Plugins for your Site’s Dashboard

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:30:36 +0000

One of the treats with a WordPress based website is how easy it is to measure results of your posts and other marketing activity. What gets measured gets done and the plugins discussed in this post can help.

Of course you can get all this from Google Analytics, and if your hosting company provides the server host logs, in programs like AWStats, Webalizer and Analog those too. But you have to login in to those services. I think it is great as long as your are in the Admin area of your WordPress based website to see how your site traffic is while you are right there … writing a post, approving comments or otherwise updating the site.

Below are four WordPress stat plugins that I like. Not sure which one I like better, they all provide a little bit different view of your site traffic and depth. They are all current (as of this post date) work well with WP 3.0 and fortunately they all seem compatible with one another.

WordPress.com Stats

If you have activated Akismet (and you should) you should also install and activate WordPress.com Stats. It uses the same API key that you use in Akismet. WordPress.com Stats provides an excellent data set for quick review with nice “drill-down” functionality. All the data is processed in WordPress’ servers so this plugin will not slow down your site or load your server. Very fast. Ultra easy to setup.

Analytics360

This plugin was developed by Alex King for MailChimp. (Alex is also the author of the indispensible Twitter Tools plugin.) Analytics360 allows you to pull your Google Analytics data into your WordPress dashboard for easy review TOGETHER with your MailChimp data. In one panel you can see how your posts and email are driving site traffic. Trends in site traffic and list growth. And your site’s top traffic sources.

This plugin does require Google Analytics (also free) and will work with or without MailChimp, but the basic MailChimp account is free and allows you a list of up to 500 addresses and 3000 sent emails per month. If you don’t already have Google Analytics tracking in your site, Google Analyticator is a very simple to use plugin that makes placing the Google Analytics script easy.

Clicky

I am liking Clicky more and more; it has very easy to read, useful interface and uses your real time site data. Joost de Valk (a true WordPress SEO master) created a new Clicky plugin to take advantage of the many new statistical features offered by Clicky. The basic Clicky stat account is free and provides some unique views of your website traffic. It is simple and quick to setup a Clicky account and then install and enable the Clicky plugin.

Woopra Analytics

“Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.” And I find that somehow the Woopra’s WordPress plugin stat reporting interface is fun to use (“fun” and “stats” don’t normally go together) and again provides some unique perspectives into your site visitors and traffic. Like all the other plugins listed here you will need an account for the data tracker, but the basic Woopra account is free and simple to setup. Just visit the Woopra website and sign up. Then place the script in your site’s footer, activate the plugin and you are good to go.

May you have great measurements! If you have any questions just email me. All four of the tools are running on this site.

New website for Midnight Magic Studios a growing wedding videography business.

Marc — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:01:19 +0000

Don Samples of Midnight Magic Studios in Knoxville TN works hard and makes really great wedding videos. He has been a long time client and I adapted the first Kertesz release for use as his website starting in 2008 using WordPress 2.5.

So it seems very unfair that his site was severely hacked recently. I think Don would be the first to admit he should have kept WordPress system more up to date, but the automated site hijack hackers are just wrong.

New Midnight Magic Studios website

After not being able to cure the site infection himself, Don contacted me in late June to see what could be done. It was pretty bad, the database and PHP files were hosed, but WordPress was able to export a clean XML file we could use to rebuild the site pretty quickly. So there were two paths, 1) restore the site using my old backup of the current theme or 2) take the opportunity to upgrade the site to a newer more appealing theme layout offering all the new WordPress 3.0 features plus better SEO, improved security, easier one click total WP site system upgrades and social media integration with Twitter and Facebook. The second choice was only about two hours more time that the first even including some new site graphics. Don chose the second option!

We picked a layout that was almost brand new and adapted well to videography. Then over the next two days I customized the layout, graphics, imported the old site’s content and setup a bunch of new features for both site visitors and search marketing. Then like the Bionic Man, Don’s site was back even better, faster, stronger than before in just three days total. And for me the best of it all is Don likes it better, too. Not to mention the improved site traffic and inquiries. All for almost the same cost as just restoring the old site.

Please visit Don’s new site and see his work. And if you have any questions about the potential advantages of a new WordPress based website system for your business please send me an email.

Selecting a Domain Name for SEO and Search Marketing Maximization

Marc — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:47:20 +0000

Later this week I am working with two different clients to select new domain names for websites that have been up for about a year. Both are small businesses.

In one case the domain name seems huge. It is 30 characters before adding any of the http:// or .com which is another 11. All together, that’s almost 1/3 of a Tweet just to text the domain name!

The other business has a pretty useful domain name. Their name follows good small business practice of using at least one keyword in the domain name, it is fairly short and is also a .com. But new state regulations are soon to make the keyword used obsolete.

As I review their websites and at look at their online business opportunity I have some ideas for new domains. So I go to Google so see how it is indexing domains and keywords in context. I also click through to potential competitors listed in the search listing to see how they use the keyword in their domain. A couple of observation I am really surprised how it seems that Google includes common abbreviations for the tested keyword in the returned search results. And how effective Google is parsing out at contextually almost any form of the keyword term from domains. Use the abbreviation as a keyword and Google even returns the full word as a keyword. Bing not so much. (Sometimes I worry that we are risking becoming a search marketing mono-culture.)

Searching for some other thoughts on selecting a small business domain name I came across these considerations/ideas.

Most small businesses do not have the money and good luck to create a new term and make it useful. Names like Xerox or Google or Bing take a lot of both. We only hear the ones that succeed or have big fails. There are a lot of others.
“.com” is still the most valuable TLD. The most common usage assumption is that a business domain name will end in “.com”. There is thought that .biz, .info and similar are not as well indexed as .com, .org and .net. I don’t know.
Hyphens or dashes are not needed to help the search engine parse out a keyword. But they do seem to help the search engine some parse out an abbreviation. (I may be wrong, but that is what I believe I am observing this weekend).
Two keywords are better than one.
Military and government websites use a lot of almost cryptic abbreviations and subdomains in their domain name. This may be a consideration if military/gov is connected to your target market.
Shorter domain names can be more useful than long ones.

Not sure how all this will impact the new domain names. In the end a domain name is personal influenced by a lot of factors. It is after all the domain name often becomes the name of the business for a large market segment. Here are the typical limitations for what a domain name can be -

Use only letters and numbers
Hyphens are ok, but not at the beginning or end.
No special characters, such as ! @ # $ % _ ^ & * ( ) ? are allowed
And “only” 63 characters from dot to dot.

If you want, the Wikipedia has all the domain name details

And I think this article from SEOmoz provides a great 12 point domain name picking run down. I use it often as a check list. You may not cover all 12, but have a reason for when you don’t.

Lastly if you find just the domain name you love and it is available, get it that minute! It is only about $15 or less to register most domain names and if you don’t get it when it is available, you may end up paying a lot more or never get it. For a little background on why that is, read these blog posts on domain name poaching or kiting.